


The Curious Phil(osophy) of Danny Castellano

by Likerealpeopledo



Category: The Mindy Project
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-11-13
Updated: 2015-11-13
Packaged: 2018-05-01 09:58:21
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,692
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5201621
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Likerealpeopledo/pseuds/Likerealpeopledo
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>It's been a long time since I've been able to write any fic, and of course, I write something about Danny. And his dad. Because I do not know how to write things that are universally enjoyable. I have problems.</p>
<p>    Dr. Phil is legitimately responsible for the italicized forgiveness advice. While I (like Danny) do not entirely endorse his ilk, sometimes you have to hang on to any port in the storm.</p>
<p>    Also, I wrote the majority of this before JKKIMH aired, so I had to add the dog. I already had the damn cat, and according to Smapdi, it was still totally plausible to have both.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Curious Phil(osophy) of Danny Castellano

Danny has never really trusted the food in California.  All of the pizza somehow manages to taste like salad (because apparently all food is just crying out for _More Avocado_!) and then as part of some sick cosmic joke, all the salad tastes eerily like fish.  And please, don’t get him started on the bagels.  

 

His dad isn’t able to eat anything with salt, or seasoning, or fat, or carbohydrates ( _More Avocado_!) and Little Danny seems only to eat things that come in brightly colored wrappers or from boxes that demand that you just add water.  

 

Plus, Danny’s never really had to entertain a teenage girl before, let alone shield one from the glaring realities of an ailing father.  He figures out fairly early on that it’s most effective talking with Little Danny the way he talks to Mindy, minus the babes and the mentions of blow jobs.  Okay fine, he now knows more about the Weeknd than he has a right to, and can pick more than one member of One Direction out of a lineup.  It doesn’t seem right, but there it is.

 

It wasn’t even until very, very recently that Danny learned Dr. Phil isn’t just a line of folksy calendars, but a real live man with a television show, books,  and a point of view.  It’s easy to dismiss as quackery, sure, but he hadn’t been pent up in the desert with an old man and a teenage girl before either.  He’s been watching old episodes on YouTube after his father’s gone to bed (which, to his credit, is about 6:45 p.m., so Danny has plenty of time for research) and as much as he hates to admit it (and gun to his head, he never, ever will), Dr. Phil is a gift to the field of psychology.    _Forgiveness is what you do for yourself, not for other people_.  It’s just so damn succinct.  He’d wear it on a t-shirt if he thought t-shirts with anything other than band logos were appropriate dress attire for a grown man outside of the gym and/or Springsteen show.

 

At the hospital, his dad had seemed so feeble and small, and at home, it turns out that he’s just the same.  It’s as if he’s been dehydrated and turned into a fine powder.   Nothing sticks. His father shuffles from room to room, a ghost of the man who used to haunt him.  It seems impossible that Danny could have once feared this man, or that the left hook he’d been wanting to deliver for so many years would ever have been able to do as much damage as his father’s heart had managed on its own.

 

They stare at each other over bland white chicken breasts two meals a day, and Danny can’t help but wonder how long before this is who he is to Leo; how soon he’ll look this small.

 

Sweet Leo, whose head always smells like the crook of Mindy’s neck, like lavender and lilacs and that powdery just after bath scent.  Leo, whose hands curl into tiny fists as he sleeps, ready to fight invisible nighttime foes, probably winged bunnies or backpack thieving foxes.  Leo, whose eyes actually light up when Danny walks into a room.  He’s probably lighting up at Morgan now, or maybe he’s wondering where Danny went off to, how he could be in the apartment one morning and gone the next.  The fact that he’s not yet developed object permanence really comes as both a blessing and a curse.    To Leo, Danny is literally out of sight, out of mind.  And what worries him the most is that he could somehow stay that way.

 

He could have driven across the country three more times and still not been able to find the words to start the conversation he’d driven there to have.   He starts and stops a thousand times, always another literal or figurative mess to clean or another flavorless meal to cook.  The home health aid never seems to be able to find anything on her own, and it’s not like Danny’s been in this house more than once before.  He can never explain to the nurse why he doesn’t know where his father keeps the ointment, or why there are only pictures of a baby girl lining the mantelpiece.

 

He sleeps in the living room, on a pull out sofa not meant for human consumption, with a cat named Butterscotch he didn’t know his father owned.  Butterscotch sleeps with his tail around Danny’s neck like a plush noose, and he wakes up every morning wondering how many other details of his dad’s life he’d fail to correctly identify if called upon.  He never would have guessed _owner of aged calico_ , or _keeps ointment in shoebox under the credenza_.  He finds out two weeks into convalescence that his father _hides cookies in the linen closet_ and _cheeks some of his more expensive medications._  

 

“Who is the child here, Danny?”  His father’s eyebrows seem to be asking, always the most expressive part of his face, after Danny flies off the handle about the hidden cookies and blood thinners, and years of pent up anything.  

 

Danny catches a glimpse of himself in the mirror over the fireplace, the wild look in his eye, the angry red slash that has become his mouth.  He hasn’t yelled this loudly since before Leo, since he realized that his fetus could hear him, could sense danger from the tone of his voice.  That he never wanted to be the reason that Leo felt endangered, somehow.  “I don’t know anymore.”

 

He’s peeling potatoes a few minutes later in an aggressive silence, film building on his fingernails.  So much starch is practically poison to someone on a cardio conscious diet, and fleetingly, he considers dipping his fingertips into his father’s dinner time glass of tomato juice as he serves it.    Those moments--the nearly homicidal ones--they come and go now like contractions, the duration and frequency seeming to subside with deep breaths and silent prayers.  

 

It isn’t worth asking his sister to pitch in as he sets the table, since Little Danny vacillates between complete sullen avoidance of her father---hidden behind a poster plastered door and protected by a wall of screaming rock music---and utter suffocation, hanging off her father’s lap, fawning over his every movement.  Tonight, she’s in Smother Mode, a plate of sugar- and gluten-free cookies balanced on her knees, her father’s knotted knuckles buried in her hair as they dazedly watch the evening news together.  

 

Just like the calico cats and shoebox medicine cabinets, he’s made a discovery--this time about himself.  He’s always seemed to mentally separate Alan into _his father_ and _her father_ , and tiny glimmers of jealousy reverberate through him as he watches Little Danny and her dad together.   Except Danny’s always known how infinitesimally people really change, and now he realizes that he and Little Danny really do share the same Alan Castellano ( _their father_ ) with all his same foibles and downfalls.  Maybe he didn’t get replaced after all.

 

After dinner, their father shuffles off to bed, at 6:46 on the dot, leaving the Dannys alone with their thoughts.  Little Danny curls into her father’s recliner with the reluctant cat, who regards the elder Danny with a haughty mewling noise as he crosses to settle onto the sofa with his phone, his lifeline.  Mindy sends new pictures of Leo at a rapid clip--she sent four more just during dinner--and he’ll stop whatever he’s doing to carefully save each image.  Leo appears to be changing hourly now, developing new dimples and losing bits of baby fat, morphing into someone that Danny isn’t sure he would recognize as quickly as he could pick out One Direction Liam, if he had to.  Even his deep brown hair is getting darker, straighter, more like Mindy’s than his.  

 

A brief irrational fear blooms with each new picture, this idea that his son might fully develop into a Mini Mindy because Danny isn’t there for Leo to take after anymore.  It makes no biological or evolutionary sense, but in a way, it does.  Look how much different he is from his own father, thanks to distance.

 

Three weeks is about nineteen days longer than he’d planned to spend here, and he knows what this is doing to Mindy, especially since she started texting him those butcher knife emojis a few days ago.   And the last thing he’s ever wanted her to feel was alone.

 

Little Danny disappears back into her black hole of hair dye and mismatched socks, mumbling a good-night as she goes.  She won’t re-emerge until the afternoon, and Danny’s grateful for the solitude as he waits for Mindy’s traditional evening phone call and searches out more of Dr. Phil’s oddly comforting platitudes.

 

“What’re ya doin’ up, Pop?”  Danny hears Alan before he sees him, the Frankenstein drag of his slippered feet across the wood floors.  He emits a sigh as he shifts, hiding the lock screen of his phone (Leo and Mindy snuggled together for a nap) under his leg as he turns.  

 

“I forget how much you’re just like Nettie.”  

 

“Huh?”

 

“You and your Ma, you’re just alike.  You make the same disapproving noises.”

 

“I don’t--”

 

“You do.  You always have, Danny.  It’s okay.”  As if being just like his mother was some kind of insult, something he had to overcome.   Creaking and groaning, his father settles back into the easy chair gingerly, hoisting a can of what has to be beer toward his lips.  “I couldn’t sleep.  Seven o’clock is too early, even for an old man.”

 

“It’s already dark, though.”  Danny offers lamely.  He’s trying to pretend that he doesn’t see the beer, that he isn’t being hurtled backward in time.  His chest compresses, and he absently runs his fingers over the three letters written nearest his heart.  “Listen, Pop, I--”  _Forgiveness is a choice. Don’t wait for it to wash over you all of a sudden.  You have to choose it._

 

His father raises his drinking hand, and a beam of moonlight catches it, revealing the logo of a generic diet ginger ale.  “Thank you for coming here and taking such good care of Little Danny.”

 

“I didn’t come here for Little Danny.”  It comes out more brusquely than he means, but it’s taken him three weeks (thirty years and three weeks) to have this conversation; he hopes it’s only his vocal cords that betray him.   _The only person you can control is you._

 

“I know, Danny, and I appreciate that.  I wouldn’t have blamed you if you hadn’t.”  He takes a deep slug of his diet soda.  “I don’t know if I could have done the same, if I was in your shoes.”

 

“Yeah, I didn’t know I could do it either.”  His phone buzzes and Mindy’s face appears from under his pajama clad thigh.  It’s after eleven o’clock in New York, and he almost wishes it could be some sort of emergency, but deep down, he knows she’s just calling to tell him about her day;  about the new deli that’s opening on Hudson, or the weird thing that Morgan said that firms up Danny’s theory that Morgan’s grandmother is both his mother and his aunt.  

 

He presses Ignore, and knows he’ll pay that price later.  Or even better,  she’ll understand after he tells her what he was doing when she called.

 

“I remembered something the other day, about when you were small.  You were probably still three or four, and I always had to get up in the middle of night to help you turn on the bathroom light.  Then one night, I flicked it on, I turned around, and the light was back off.  I asked you, Danny, why is the light off?  And do you know what you said to me?”  Alan’s eyebrows arch, each word punctuated with a slow and deliberate pause.  “You said, “Because I’m not afraid of anything.”

 

“And you believed me?”  The phone buzzes again, and his eyes flick down to it, because maybe there is something wrong with Leo, or maybe--

 

“Answer it, Danny.  It’s okay.  I’m not going anywhere.”

 

It’s four words, I’m not going anywhere, and he can feel the heat rising past his neck and into his cheeks.  He presses Ignore a second time, and expels the breath he’s been holding since he arrived in California.  “I can’t fall for that line twice.”

 

“Danny.”  He’s becoming oddly accustomed to hearing exasperation in every syllable of his name.

 

“You know how many times I wished you were dead over the last thirty years?  Like a conservative estimate?”

 

“How many, Danny?”   Alan sounds almost amused, like he’s answering a riddle.

 

“Ballpark figure, every time someone else was happy.  Give or take.” _When you're locked up in an emotional prison, you give away your power._

 

“Do you still wish that?”  

 

“If I did, do you think I’d still be here?  That you’d still be here?  I’d just let you feed the rest of your Warfarin to the damn cat and we’d start the Castellano Memorial Pet Cemetery in your honor.”

 

Alan grunts a laugh.  “Can’t get anything past you, can I?”

 

“We had to get a new dog! You thought I wasn’t going to notice?”

 

“You were always such an observant kid.  You watched people like a hawk.  I always knew you could take care of yourself.  Ever since--”  

 

“I was a kid.  You can’t just leave--” _If you didn't receive support when you needed it, give it to yourself now._  “I was a kid.”

 

The can pulsates in his father’s hand, crunching in his fist.  “It was never about you, Danny.  I hope you know that.”

 

A truck drives by the front window, headlights blinding Danny temporarily.  When he focuses again, his father’s hands are empty, clasped tightly in his lap.  “I don’t think I did.” He answers, the words barely scraping over his larynx.  

 

“I knew that you guys could have a better life if I wasn’t there to interfere.  I had my own problems, and your Mom and I, we couldn’t get over them.  Not the way things were.  Look at you, with your fancy apartments and your practice and your wife and baby, you’re happy.  I didn’t keep you from any of that.”

 

“No, I guess you didn’t.”   It’s the almost part that gets him, though.  How close he came to not having any of it, but whose fault was that, really?

 

“Thank you for coming here and taking care of an old coot.  But I’m feeling stronger every day.  And the nurse and I are getting, well, more used to each other.”

 

“Are you kicking me out?”  He’d be incredulous if he wasn’t so relieved.

 

“You’re welcome here anytime, Danny.  You know that.  But you’re itchin’ to get back where you belong.”

 

He knows that he can have a ticket booked and be back East in less than twenty-four hours, and the joy that comes with that knowledge almost surpasses the resentment he’s just jettisoned.  “I miss ‘em like crazy.”  Danny toys with his phone, the lock screen flashing on and off like a fever dream.  Maybe Mindy and Leo do still belong to him.  “Hey, did you ever miss us?  After you--”

 

“All the time, Danny.  All the time.”  

 

Danny hoists himself off the lumpy sofa, grateful for his newly granted reprieve and eager to seek out Little Danny’s laptop to buy his return ticket.  As he passes his father’s chair, he leans over to say “Good night,” and drops a brief kiss on the top of Alan’s head, the wiry hairs rough against his chin.  “And turn on a goddamn light every once in awhile, Dad.  Jesus.”

 

_There is no right timeline for recovery. For some people, making peace happens suddenly and spontaneously. For others, it takes time and effort. You may have to make a conscious effort every day to forgive. To say, "I'm letting this go. I'm not going to invest hatred, bitterness, anger, resentment in this person anymore." You can find closure in forgiveness._


End file.
